“She’s pretty,” said Mrs Tempest after a pause. She started forward, a small woman ready to do the right thing, hand outstretched. “Do we–”

“Don’t touch her,” said Mrs Bannister proprietorially. “It frightens her.”

“But can’t the girl say anything?” asked Paul Marchant, struck by this particular aspect of femininity.

Mrs Bannister shook her head. “She hasn’t seen or heard or spoken a word for over three years.”

“Poor kid,” said Mrs Forbes. “I hope the doctors can do something for her.”

They were all slightly ill at ease, like worshippers in a strange church, confronted with something so far from normal that they feared to show their awkwardness in dealing with it. Almost any word or action could be the ‘wrong thing’. But now there came an interruption.

“Pardon me,” said the hovering newspaperman, the one without the camera, to Mrs Bannister. “Are you Mrs Ballater?”

“Mrs Bannister,” she answered, nodding.

“Can you let me have something for the Star-Telegram?” He jerked his head towards Esther. “I guess that’s the girl. How old is she?”

He questioned, and Mrs Bannister answered readily, for some time; he was a tall and personable young man, and his obvious interest was pleasing. There was much that he was curious about – the sort of home Esther had come from, the details of the accident, the plans for helping her now. The group stood silent as the two of them talked: occasionally the others glanced at Esther, and then away again, while Esther stood motionless, waiting for direction.

Finally the newspaperman finished his questions with: “What gave you the idea, in the first place?”

Mrs Bannister smiled. “I just wanted to help her, I guess. It was the village where I was born.”

“It’s a wonderful thing to do,” said the newspaperman cordially, “and I hope it works out.” He closed his notebook. “Thanks a lot, Mrs Bannister.”

“Sure you’ve got that right?” asked Mrs Bannister.

“B-A-N-N-I-S-T-E-R.”

His eyes flickered over her face for a second, knowing and yet non-committal. “I’ll get it right,” he said, after a moment. “Don’t you fret.”

The things they now did to Esther Costello would not have disgraced a progressive African tribe whose witch doctors, competing against the unknown, pooled their traditional arts and rivalled each other in inventing new ones.

First they looked at her, outside and in, from every angle; shaking their heads the while, and waggling their beards. They X-rayed her head and her neck: they peered down her throat: they wormed their way into her ears: they stared with bright lights at her eyes. Then they started active warfare. They shaved off nearly all her hair. They fed her strange meals, and starved her for weeks at a time. They took out two of her wisdom teeth. They gave her every variety of shock therapy that had yet been devised. They tried to startle her with loud noises, they jabbed her with instruments. They removed a two-inch circle of the dome of her skull, and wired it back on again with three millimetres more clearance. They psychoanalysed her, so far as this could be done without answers of any sort, endeavouring to find out what she liked and what she feared. They tried the effect of pain, involving treatment to the soles of the feet, and pleasure, which was focused elsewhere. They gave her chicken pox on purpose, and measles by mistake. They brought her temperature down to eighty-six degrees, then made her blood boil with fever. They evolved a plan for impregnating her, and then aborting her after three months; but it was thought that, at fourteen-and-a-half she was a year too young. Instead they dipped her in thermal baths, and planted blisters at the nape of her neck, and gave her generous injections of insulin, and an induced orgasm under pentothal.